I'm the founder of Millennial Branding, a Gen-Y research and management consulting firm. I also wrote the #1 international bestselling book, Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future, now in 13 languages. My second book, Promote Yourself: The New Rules For Career Success, will be released in 2013 by St. Martins Press. I've been featured in over 500 media outlets, including Wired and ELLE magazines. I've also written for BusinessWeek, CNN International, TIME, The Wall Street Journal and several other national outlets. I speak on topics such as Gen-Y workforce management, personal branding, social media, and career development for companies such as Google, Time Warner, IBM, and CitiGroup. In 2010, I was named to the Inc. Magazine 30 Under 30 List, and BusinessWeek cited me as someone entrepreneurs should follow on Twitter.

Hire For Attitude

Mark Murphy is the author Hiring for Attitude, as well as the bestsellers Hundred Percenters and HARD Goals. The founder and CEO of Leadership IQ, a top-rated provider of cutting-edge research and leadership training, Mark has personally provided guidance to more than 100,000 leaders from virtually every industry and half the Fortune 500. His public leadership seminars, custom corporate training, and online training programs have yielded remarkable results for companies including MicrosoftMicrosoft, IBMIBM, GE, MasterCardMasterCard, MerckMerck, AstraZenecaAstraZeneca, MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Johns Hopkins.

In this interview, Mark talks about why so many new hires fail so quickly, why soft skills are so important now, how the hiring landscape is changing, and more.

Why do so many fail within the first 18 months of taking a job?

When our research tracked 20,000 new hires, 46% of them failed within 18 months. But even more surprising than the failure rate, was that when new hires failed, 89% of the time it was for attitudinal reasons and only 11% of the time for a lack of skill. The attitudinal deficits that doomed these failed hires included a lack of coachability, low levels of emotional intelligence, motivation and temperament.

Are technical and soft skills less important than attitude? Why?

It’s not that technical skills aren’t important, but they’re much easier to assess (that’s why attitude, not skills, is the top predictor of a new hire’s success or failure). Virtually every job (from neurosurgeon to engineer to cashier) has tests that can assess technical proficiency. But what those tests don’t assess is attitude; whether a candidate is motivated to learn new skills, think innovatively, cope with failure, assimilate feedback and coaching, collaborate with teammates, and so forth.

Soft skills are the capabilities that attitude can enhance or undermine. For example, a newly hired executive may have the intelligence, business experience and financial acumen to fit well in a new role. But if that same executive has an authoritarian, hard-driving style, and they’re being hired into a social culture where happiness and camaraderie are paramount, that combination is unlikely to work. Additionally, many training programs have demonstrated success with increasing and improving skills—especially on the technical side. But these same programs are notoriously weak when it comes to creating attitudinal change. As Herb Kelleher, former Southwest Airlines CEO used to say, “we can change skill levels through training, but we can’t change attitude.”

How will the hiring landscape be different in 2012 and beyond?

Between the labor pool from China and India and the fact that there are so many workers sitting out there unemployed, we can find the skills we need. The lack of sharp wage increases in most job categories is further evidence of the abundant supply of skills. Technical proficiency, once a guarantee of lifetime employment, is a commodity in today’s job market. Attitude is what today’s companies are hiring for. And not just any attitude; companies want attitudes that perfectly match their unique culture. Google and Apple are both great companies, but their cultures are as different as night and day.

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At our recruiting firm, we use an assessment test from Cream Metrics. Not every hire is a home run, but more often than not, the hire works out very well for our clients. I bring it up because they have been talking about the 11% lacking skill statistic for some time and I thought it extremely pertinent.

Mark’s company does a lot of good work, but there’s much more to making and retaining the right people. It’s correct that attitude makes a big difference, but if you hire a salesman with a great attitude to sell 500k plus deals you also need a guy with the right skills and abilities. This entire process must begin with executive team alignment. If they are not directly involved with attitude, culture, strategies, etc, Sh*t will inevitably roll down hill. The entire process of aligning talent strategy with business strategy is a comprehensive approach that must begin with the CEO and his/her commitment to building a healthy, profitable company.

This sort of sensible recruiting is what I’ve been hearing that companies are moving towards for several years, however, I don’t see it in practice anywhere (maybe except for the couple of companies mentioned in this article).

Most companies today are absolutely hiring for culture fit as opposed to technical skills. In my experience, technical skills can be taught, but attitude cannot.

In the staffing and recruiting industry, we are seeing more and more clients request candidates that mesh with their unique culture. They have specific personality requirements that must be met. At the same time, they want qualified applicants, so it’s not that companies are sacrificing one for another.

Internally, we also hire specifically for attitude and culture fit. We have candidates meet with multiple members of our staff so that they can understand our culture and we can see if they fit with ours.

I agree. It could be that in the industry I work the reality set is different from the rest of the world. Salaries everywhere have fallen. The reality is that hundreds of thousands of people have had to take pay cuts in order to stay in the job market. More than that lost their jobs and can’t find anything. Employers want those with industry experience and training programs have been eliminated so employees have to hit the ground running.

When an employer makes a good faith offer of employment, if it is not good enough then don’t take it. I would prefer to have someone who is either a new kid with a great attitude or a person who afforded a chance to get back in the job market that is grateful and will do the best they can with what they have.

I am tired of individuals who have overblown ideas of who they are and what they can do. I am tired of individuals who tell me they were the crème-de-la-crème and know better than everyone else. I am tired of individuals who are bitter and let everyone that they are because it reeks out of every one of their pores that life has dealt them such an awful blow. These individuals with attitudinal issues need to wake up and smell the coffee. They used to be at the top of the world but now they are at the bottom of the heap. Like it or not.

As far as the interview process, attitudinal issues donot necessarily show up. They show up in the day to day grind. The first onese to findout are the coworkers who need to listen to the diatribe. They are the ones that come to management to say things like, I can’t work with so and so anymore. I can’t stand to hear about how great s/he was someplace else. Doesn’t s/he realize that s/he was FIRED so maybe s/he wasn’t as good as s/he thought she was?

I think we are going to continue to see those people who use more than their skills and degrees gain traction in the workplace while those who show up with a sense of entitlement and absence of empathy will not achieve what they believe they should. People like Dale Carnegie began writing about the importance of “social intelligence” in his book How to Win Friends and Influence People in the 1950’s. Daniel Goleman has spearheaded the Emotional Intelligence movement and with his colleagues is demonstrating how our brains our wired to connect. Despite all of this, manners, etiquette and respect seem to have gone out of fashion, replaced by an attitude of “what can my boss or organization do for me.”

The attitude of permissiveness (I can do what I want without consequence) and entitlement (I am amazing. My parents told me every day I was. You have to treat me the same way.) demonstrate how disconnected many young people are growing up divorced from the reality of life in the business world and what it really takes to work with others and of course to compete and succeed.

Without emotional intelligence, a moral compass and empathy for the impact that behavior has on others, there can be little hope of employees aligning with the goals of the organization. This type of employee will be more concerned with their own agenda than what their employers want and need. Those employees who are self-aware, know what their potential is, and are willing to work hard to achieve the goals set out for them with a positive mental attitude will rise to the top. Motivated from within, they don’t whine about every little thing they don’t like or engage in power struggles with their boss. They don’t expect their boss to motivate them or to make them feel special. They have cultivated a positive mental attitude within them and are fueled by their own desire to become who they are meant to be.

Employers who tolerate and foster entitlement in their workplace need to get busy defining emotional and behavioral competence and manage their performance accordingly. They do employees a disservice when they allow this attitude to prevail without defining expectations for attitude and behavior, instead complaining about or avoiding problem employees.

Hi Mark, I read your position on the important issue of Attitude in the work place. I agree with you, as a matter of fact this is one major issue we as an organisation ( GIC TRAINING ) is promoting currently in our country Nigeria. No corporate entity can grow beyond the attitude of its workforce. well done. Ayo Ajasa

Thanks Dan for highlighting some key messages from Hiring For Attitude. I can see what Mark is getting at. Employers’ recruitment goal is to hire people who have experience, skills, and confidence. Those qualities add value to teams.

Employers don’t want to go to the expense of hiring someone with technical ability, only to let them go because they do not work well with others. Smart advice for people applying for a role (aside from Be Authentic)?

First, remind the interviewer you have the right skills to contribute to the team.

Then, give an example showing how you connect well to colleagues and clients.

Finally, be resilient and learn from the interview feedback, whatever the outcome.